Cloning and Replacing HDD

Post by **Kills On Site** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 4:09 pm

I am replacing a HDD for a buisness that is getting quite a few bad sector errors. The computer can only have minimal down time and reinstalling the OS and building up is out of the question. I need a program that will copy the drive over so that it will maintain all the files, partitions and bootability that is has now, just without the bad sectors. What is the best and safest method of doing this?

Post by **Foo** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 4:18 pm

The bad sectors are going to give you trouble but your options for drive cloning are:
Acronis Trueimage
Norton Ghost
Powerquest Driveimage

All work fine and are quite straightforwards. All you'll need is a boot CD for one of them, and both hard drives plugged into the PC.

Then for example with ghost, you boot your ghost CD, select LOCAL

DISK

TO DISK then pick the source and destination disks. Best to use a slightly bigger disk for the destination, if only because it makes identifying each drive easier in ghost.

Cloning a drive should take between 5 and 15 mins depending on the size of the drive. Its fastest if they're attached to seperate IDE lines.

Post by **Kills On Site** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 1:09 am

Well the primary partition, drive C:, has no errors logged for any bad blocks, only drive D:, which is the extended partition and only has two or three files, Norton Ghost images I believe. Would any of these solutions allow me to clone only drive C: and then create D: myself and work from there?

Post by **Foo** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 6:29 pm

Yes. All of them, I believe.

Post by **Kills On Site** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 7:10 pm

Another question, this time about backing up. I got the buisness a 160GB Maxtor OneTouch III external HDD. I know it backs up files to a folder on it and it keeps the structure of all the files and folders. My question is, can it restore an entire HDD in case of failure or does it not go that deep, or could all the files and folders be copied onto a new HDD that was formatted and had an MBR and boot and run correctly? I don't know if anyone would really know, just thought I'd ask anyway.

Also, I have Ghost 12, I booted it and tried to find what you said Foo and I couldn't.